Photo courtesy of Bob DelaneyNBA official Bob Delaney, left, plans to make more trips to Iraq after retiring to discuss post-traumatic stress.

The problem first arose about six months after they pulled the plug on Project Alpha, the historic New Jersey waterfront sting operation that defined Bob Delaney’s career as a cop.

This was 1979. Bob Delaney thought the transition would be easy, because he had his regular cop life back. His chief concern was staying alive as long as it took the DiNorscio crime family to conclude that putting a hit on the young cop who had destroyed its syndicate was no longer a practical option.

Then another issue emerged. Delaney had spent so many nights doing business with thugs at the Santa Lucia Villa in Newark, it was apparent to those around him that he wasn’t easily letting go of the “Bobby Covert” incarnation he had invented.

Think it’s easy for a 26-year-old cop to emerge from an alternate universe? One that involved being embedded with the mob for 2½ years? Consider the physical toll alone: Delaney was now 240 pounds, and he knew how to go through a dozen Dewars-and-waters just to keep pace with the wiseguys.

A fellow detective, John Schroth, finally pointed it out: “Kid,” he told Delaney, “Every time you go into a bar, you go into a Bobby Covert routine and start buying everyone drinks.”

“The lines were very blurred,” Delaney recalled the other day.

Basically, he was “lost in the role,” as the method actors say. He felt guilt for putting old pals in prison (violent lowlifes that they were) but it was more than just the Stockholm syndrome that was cluttering the maladjusted corner of Delaney’s mind.

“Back in those days, post-traumatic stress wasn’t really a diagnosis — we just called them ‘flashbacks,’” he explained. “But that’s what I had. And the thing that was most liberating was peer-to-peer therapy.”

His main counselor was the legendary Joe Pistone — you know him as the real-life Donnie Brasco — who had just resurfaced himself.

Now, at 59, Delaney is going underground again — he won’t be working in front of 18,000 people anymore, anyway. The Paterson native calls his final regular-season NBA game in Orlando tonight, and following the playoffs, he’s dropping the whistle after 25 seasons.

He’s preparing for another transition, one as life-affirming as the first, when basketball arrived just in time to restore his sanity.

The new calling is reflected by the title of his second book — “Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post-traumatic Stress” — which is due out in August.

Yes, your first association with post-traumatic stress disorder relates to combat soldiers, as it should. Delaney has been to Iraq twice, met countless troops and their officers, visited every military hospital from Walter Reed to Landstuhl in Germany, and interviewed dozens of doctors specializing in PTSD. This book is a compendium of what he has learned, and what the rest of us need to know.

Courtesy of Bob DelaneyNBA official Bob Delaney, center, has made two trips to Iraq to help troops cope with PTSD.

“The things our soldiers carry with them, most of us can’t even comprehend,” Delaney said. “You can’t keep suppressing it. You can self-medicate and pretend you’re tough enough to handle it. But eventually, it has to come out. And the first line of defense is getting these warriors to share it with someone who understands.”

The latest figures are startling. Officially, 37 percent of vets have mental health issues, with 22 percent suffering from PTSD. You know where this is going: There were 301 suicides among Army or National Guard troops in 2010 alone, a 20 percent jump from the previous year.

So it’s time to act, especially if you think — as Delaney does — that those PTSD statistics are low.

“I believe it’s at an epidemic proportion,” he said. “But it’s not something to be afraid of. There are ways to work through it.”

His own method works brilliantly. He tells his Covert stories — a frightful trip behind enemy lines, if there ever was one — and his tall NBA tales. From there, a mystical bond forms.

Gen. Bob Brown, the Fort Benning commander who hosted Delaney at Camp Marez in northern Iraq in 2009, told us that Delaney “related to the soldiers better than any non-military leader or civilian visitor I’ve seen in my years in the military. He would be up until 3 in the morning talking to soldiers — and I mean three or four nights in a row.”

“You know me, I can do 15 minutes when the refrigerator light goes on,” Delaney said. “But I tell them my story, and hope it’s reflective of their story. Just by having those things as part of my life, we’re able to start the dialogue. And then it becomes less of a speech and more of a sharing.”

The connection he has with these kids is clear. Like them, he has experienced an unbearable stress. Like them, he had an extremely challenging readjustment to a “normal” life. And like these kids, Delaney has an unshakable patriotism.

So now, he is going into the healing business.

It’s the most important job he’ll ever have.

And being Delaney, he’s jumped in with both feet.

“You always hear people say, ‘We support the troops,” but it has to be more than words,” he said.

“Our parents’ generation was known as the ‘Greatest Generation,’ and rightfully so. But we’re upon the next great generation — these young people volunteer and have been at war for 10 years. They represent a small minority, just 1.1 percent of our population. And now it’s our duty to serve them and be their voice.”